Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again. — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“Open your eyes, the Frenchman on the radio used to say, and see what you can with them before they close forever.” — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“Just when we think we have a system, ...the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“An hour passed and another and then, like a glass of water overfilled - the meniscus inverting, going convex, gravity pulling at the edges,… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“For dinner, he orders wild boar cooked with fresh mushrooms. And a full bottle of Bordeaux. Especially during wartime, such things remain important. They… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.” — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever. — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“...the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.” — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
“silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the… — Anthony Doerr Copy Share Image
